The sun had already set when the woman with long gray hair descended the steps to the same prison gate she had passed through all those years ago.
Mahvash Sabet had been behind bars for an eternal decade, and on this evening, she was leaving Tehran's Evin Prison without money or possessions or anyone waiting for her.
Iranian authorities released Sabet from her jail cell a day ahead of schedule at a little after 5 p.m., the deadline for prisoners to make their last phone calls of the day. The move was deliberate, she believes, to keep her homecoming quiet and largely removed from media glare. She had become, after all, internationally known.
Outside the prison gate, Sabet asked to borrow a passerby's phone, then waited patiently for the 90 minutes it took her husband to cross Tehran in rush-hour traffic.
She had been arrested, interrogated and tortured for her faith -- she is Baha'i, a religion the Islamic Republic of Iran considers heresy. She and six other members of an informal Baha'i council known as the Yaran, or Friends in Iran, were arrested in 2008.
Her Baha'i beliefs in peace, altruism and humanity were, undoubtedly, instrumental to Sabet's perseverance in prison. But she also relied on something else: poetry.
"Writing," she says, "became my means of survival."
She scribbled her words on paper napkins and towels and shoved them into pockets and purses during precious "contact" visits with family, when they were not separated by the usual thick glass.
The words she managed to get out of prison described a place of bleakness but one that could not break the human spirit.
Author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani reads a statement from Mahvash Sabet at a PEN International ceremony honoring Sabet's poetry.
Author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani reads a statement from Mahvash Sabet at a PEN International ceremony honoring Sabet's poetry.
They were words that recently earned Sabet recognition from English PEN, the founding center of PEN International, which promotes freedom of expression. Poet Michael Longley, winner of this year's PEN Pinter prize, named Sabet as the 2017 International Writer of Courage.
"Her imagination is rhapsodic. Her poems want to soar," Longley said at a ceremony in London.
He called her incarceration a "sin against the light" and then, quoting William Blake, said: "The power of dictators to silence and imprison writers continues to 'put all heaven in a rage.'"
Sabet walked free of Evin Prison on September 18, the eve of President Donald Trump's speech to the United Nations, which focused in part on Iran. But, really, she had escaped prison long ago, when she began writing.
What are they doing to us in this perilous place,
this prison of loss?
But what can they do to a handful of dust
in the middle of chaos?
If they cut open our veins, red tulips will blush
like blood in the fields.
If they padlock our lips, the mouths of a thousand
spring buds are unsealed.
